Sons of the Covenant: The Untold History of B'nai B'rith, the ADL, & the Assault on Dissent (Part II)
The People vs. Leo Frank...
“I think there was a reasonable case against Leo Frank.”
― Steve Oney, Author of And The Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank
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On April 26th, 1913, an event occurred in Atlanta, Georgia, that would resonate throughout American history as one of its most contentious criminal cases, comparable only to the O.J. Simpson trial decades later.
Leo Frank, a Brooklyn-born Jewish factory manager, found himself at the center of a savage crime — the rape and murder of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, an employee at his factory. For some, Leo Frank has become a tragic hero — an educated Jewish industrialist from New York and the president of Atlanta’s B’nai B’rith chapter, wrongly accused in an environment supposedly steeped in hostility. To others, Frank is a serial adulterer and predator who used his powerful connections to evade justice through manipulation, bribery, and coercion.
It is within this charged atmosphere that the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL) was formed. Though the official narrative proffered by the ADL and its defenders insists that its founding was unrelated to the Frank trial, extensive historical records suggest otherwise. Indeed, the Frank case served as a potent catalyst for rallying support and justifying the ADL's mission. Today, the ADL's founding narrative depicts Leo Frank as a martyr:
In 1913, the Jewish community in the United States faced rampant antisemitism and overt discrimination. Books, plays and, above all, newspapers, depicted Jews with crude stereotypes. Against this backdrop of bigotry and intolerance, an attorney from Chicago named Sigmund Livingston, put forward a bold idea—to create an organization with a mission “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all…” The Anti-Defamation League was founded with the clear understanding that the fight against one form of prejudice could not succeed without battling prejudice in all forms.
During this same time, an event in Georgia made the need for the organization painfully clear. Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman who moved to Atlanta to manage his family’s pencil factory, was convicted of the rape and murder of a 13-year-old female employee, following a trial that was defined by antisemitism. When the Governor reduced Leo Frank’s death sentence to life in prison, a hate-filled mob—which included many influential community leaders—dragged Frank from his prison cell and lynched him.
It was not until decades later, at ADL’s urging, that the State of Georgia issued Frank a posthumous pardon.
This sanitized narrative, long promoted by the ADL and its allies, frames Leo Frank as a victim of a virulent wave of antisemitism. According to this version, Frank was unjustly convicted due to widespread prejudice rather than credible evidence. However, contemporary testimonies and court transcripts paint a strikingly different picture, one deliberately obscured or outright ignored by Frank's defenders.
— (L) Mary Phagan (1900-1913). (R) Leo Frank pictured making a phallic joke with a cigar.
Contrary to the claims of those same defenders, the immediate suspicions surrounding Frank were not rooted in prejudice but rather sprang directly from his own troubling and contradictory behavior in the hours following Mary Phagan’s brutal murder. Officer W.W. "Boots" Rogers was among the first officers to interact with Frank and personally drove the accused to the scene of the crime. As the first witness called at trial, Rogers described Frank’s nervous demeanor vividly:
Q. Was he well groomed?—A. Yes; I noticed particularly that he had on a clean white pleated bosom shirt. He was nervous, and moved about very nervously.
— “Boots” Rogers Tells How Body Was Found, May 8th, 1913
Asked how he determined Frank’s nervousness, the veteran officer explained simply, "By the questions he asked." As others would testify, and before ever being informed of what had occurred at his factory that fateful Spring day, Frank was already displaying clear signs of evasion and nervousness.
Frank further compromised his credibility through inconsistent statements. When first informed of the murder, Frank initially claimed he did not know Mary Phagan, asserting he knew very few factory employees at all (despite personally handing them their checks on a routine basis):
When we got into the automobile, Mr. Frank wanted to know what had happened at the factory, and I asked him if he knew Mary Phagan, and told him she had been found dead in the basement. Mr. Frank said he did not know any girl by the name of Mary Phagan, that he knew very few of the employees. [This was the second time, according to testimony at the trial, that Frank had denied knowing Mary Phagan].
— Mary Phagan Kean, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan, Pg. 79-80
Yet almost immediately afterward, Frank contradicted himself dramatically. Rogers recalled Frank swiftly and precisely identifying Phagan from his payroll ledger:
Q. What did Frank do?—A. He looked in his books, ran his finger down a column and said: “Yes, she was here.” Then he said: “Yes, she was paid off yesterday. I can tell you just when. The stenographer and office boy left at 12 o’clock and she came in here—let’s see, I can tell you the exact time—it was 10 minutes past 12. I paid her $1.20.” Frank looked nervous and asked if anyone had found the envelope; that it must be around “there somewhere.”
Q. Did you take Frank into the basement?—A. Yes, we went down. Frank ran the elevator.
Q. Did he say anything about the negro running the elevator?—A. Yes, he was asked if the negro ever ran it, and he said no.
— “Boots” Rogers Tells How Body Was Found, May 8th, 1913
Frank’s sudden, detailed recollection starkly undermined his initial denials. Additionally, when questioned about factory operations, Frank claimed that Jim Conley, the African-American janitor, never operated the elevator: these details would prove fatal to Frank’s defense when he would later accuse Conley of operating that very elevator. It is these wild inconsistencies that aroused legitimate suspicion toward Frank, not any sort of class bias or “anti-Semitic” motivations. Indeed, the grand jury that indicted Frank notably included several respected members of Atlanta’s Jewish community, further disproving the ADL’s narrative of racial or religious bias.
From the outset, B’nai B’rith, the ADL's parent organization, recognized the Frank case as a pivotal moment. They mobilized swiftly to defend the president of their Atlanta chapter, investing vast resources into shaping public perception through media influence, legal strategy, and political lobbying. Frank’s defense quickly transformed from a criminal matter into a broader ideological campaign against “anti-Semitism” — a deliberate, calculated move by B'nai B'rith leaders to use the case as a symbol around which to galvanize their nascent Anti-Defamation League.
Before delving into the details of Frank’s trial itself, it is essential to first dismantle this carefully crafted and misleading origin story, revealing the depth of deception employed by the ADL and B'nai B'rith from their very inception. In the Order’s first official history book, B’nai B’rith member Edward Grusd barely mentions the League’s founding and not does not devote a single sentence to the Leo Frank case. In an equally glowing tome, Cornelia Wilhelm conveniently cuts off her historical treatment of B’nai B’rith in 1913, devoting a scant paragraph to the eventual fate of Frank — all without mentioning the rape and murder of Mary Phagan whatsoever.
The ADL’s claim that its founding was unrelated to the Frank case is demonstrably false: the Frank case was not merely coincidental to their formation — it was foundational.
“The ADL was founded just over a century ago with the central goal of preventing a Jewish rapist and killer from being held legally accountable for his crimes...”
— Ron Unz, American Pravda: The ADL in American Society
The trial that followed the discovery of Mary Phagan’s battered body in the basement of the National Pencil Company was, at that time, the longest lasting and most expensive trial in Georgia history. Hundreds of witnesses were subpoenaed in proceedings that lasted 29 days from start to finish. Ultimately, it revealed not only a pattern of evasion and contradiction by Frank, but a history of lechery and coercion stretching far beyond April 26th, 1913.
The prosecution’s case was built on testimony — damning, specific, and consistent. It began with James Conley, the Black janitor whose chilling account of the day’s events aligned so perfectly with the physical evidence that the police were stunned:
According to Conley, when Mary Phagan arrived for her pay a little afternoon, he saw her go up the stairs on her way to Frank’s office. While in his position at the first-floor stairwell, Conley says he heard two sets of footsteps go from Frank’s office to the rear of the second floor, but then heard a scream and only one set of steps return. Moments later a visibly shaken Leo Frank signaled Conley to come upstairs and directed him to the back room, where Conley discovered the girl’s body, bloodied and lifeless, with a cord wrapped tightly around her neck. Frank explained that he had tried to have sex with the girl, but when she resisted he struck her, leading to her accidental and tragic demise. Conley’s account was rich enough with significant details to startle the police by its accuracy. His narrative of that day’s events corresponded to the physical evidence police had collected and with the accounts of other witnesses, and, most important for investigators, a motive came into full view.
— The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man, Pg. 48
While his initial testimony did not include all of these details, his story nevertheless remained consistent once divulged. The details Conley offered matched blood spots, the elevator use, and drag marks in the basement — evidence that had not been made public and which Leo Frank himself could not explain away. As the Atlanta Guardian noted at the time: “Conley testified with dramatic rapidity…. He repeated the alleged conversations with Frank verbatim. At no time did he display any uncertainty.”
But Conley was only one of many.
A cascade of young women — former employees — testified to Frank’s reputation inside the factory. They spoke of groping, invitations behind locked doors, and crude innuendos. The following testimony by Nellie Wood describes Frank’s routine behavior with his female employees:
Q. “Do you know Leo Frank?”
A. “I worked for him two days.”
Q. “Did you observe any misconduct on his part?”
A. “Well, his actions didn’t suit me. He’d come around and put his hands on me, when such conduct was entirely uncalled for.”
Q. “Is that all he did?”
A. “No. He asked me one day to come into his office, saying that he wanted to talk to me. He tried to close the door, but I wouldn’t let him. He got too familiar by getting so close to me. He also put his hands on me.”
Q. “Where did he put his hands?”
A. “He barely touched my breast. He was subtle with his approaches, and tried to pretend that he was joking, but I was too wary for such as that.”
Q. “Did he try further familiarities?”
A. “Yes.”
— The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man, Pg. 92-93
Mary Phagan herself, according to friends, had complained about Frank's behavior long before the day she died:
A friend of Mary Phagan’s named George Epps told investigators that Mary had expressed to him her fears of Frank’s improper advances. Mary’s stepfather, J. W. Coleman, revealed: “[Mary] had often said that things went on at the factory that were not nice, and that some of the people there tried to get fresh. ‘She told most of those stories to her mother.’”
Thirteen-year-old Grace Hicks claimed that Mary had complained to her that Leo M. Frank had put his arm around her, and asked Mary if she wanted to take a joy ride of Heaven, and that Mary Phagan had asked Frank, ‘How?’ to which Frank replied that he would show her some day.
— The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man, Pg. 94-95
Even Frank’s defense team admitted that the factory owner had engaged in numerous affairs behind his wife’s back.
Then came Monteen Stover, a teenage employee who arrived at the factory at the very hour Frank had claimed to be in his office. She found it empty:
Q. (by Mr. Dorsey) You were at the factory on April 26?
A. Yes, in Mr. Frank's office.
Q. How long did you stay there?
A. Five minutes.
Q. Was Frank there, or was anybody in the building?
A. Mr. Frank was not there and I saw no one in the building.
Q. Did you look at the clock?
A. Yes, the first thing I did on going in was to look at the clock. It was twelve-five, and I looked at it when I went out and it showed twelve-ten.
— Night Fell on Georgia, Pg. 58
That five-minute gap — between 12:05 and 12:10 — collapsed Frank’s entire alibi. It was undoubtedly the window in which Mary Phagan was killed.
— Autopsy photos of Mary Phagan.
The defense team, many of whom were prominent members of B’nai B’rith, mounted one of the most aggressive and far-reaching propaganda campaigns in American legal history. From the moment Leo Frank was indicted, an extensive network of Jewish business leaders, media owners, and political influencers mobilized behind him:
Although his role was largely concealed at the time, the most important new backer whom Frank attracted was Albert Lasker of Chicago, the unchallenged monarch of American consumer advertising, which constituted the life’s blood of all of our mainstream newspapers and magazines. Not only did he ultimately provide the lion’s share of the funds for Frank’s defense, but he focused his energies upon shaping the media coverage surrounding the case. Given his dominant business influence in that sector, we should not be surprised that a huge wave of unremitting pro-Frank propaganda soon began appearing across the country in both local and national publications, extending to most of America’s most popular and highly-regarded media outlets, with scarcely a single word told on the other side of the story. This even included all of Atlanta’s own leading newspapers, which suddenly reversed their previous positions and became convinced of Frank’s innocence.
— Ron Unz, The ADL in American Society
In tandem, B’nai B’rith dispatched resources across the country, and by early 1914, the organization’s Washington-based lobbying apparatus had transformed the Frank case from a Georgia criminal trial into a national political crusade.
It is ironic that, for all the talk of racial prejudice by the defense and Frank’s later defenders, it was Frank’s B’nai B’rith legal team who rested the bulk of their defense on the claim that no white man could commit a crime as savage as this:
Attorney Reuben Arnold elaborated at trial: “It was the crime of a savage negro, whose first attack is violence, because he can not accomplish his object in any other way.” He added: “We don’t know how long it took the nigger to kill the child.”
— The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man, Pg. 58
The only legal team trafficking in racial stereotypes as a strategy was Leo Frank’s. Their campaign was not limited to the courtroom however. In fact, the legal arguments were almost secondary to the broader media blitz.
Major newspapers across the Northeast — The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe — began publishing editorials that framed the case in starkly moralistic terms:
No one was more convinced of Frank’s innocence than Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, and his conviction, no matter how well-intentioned, led to journalistic excesses. Ochs turned the paper of record into a pro-Frank propaganda machine. It printed hundreds of stories that played up facts in his favor. How biased was the Times? Researchers examining recently located files in the paper’s archives discovered a trove of photographs of the Phagan crime scene in which models reenact the murder in a sequence staged to establish Conley’s guilt. The pictures were commissioned by Ochs as the courts weighed Frank’s fate, and while he did not run them, they offer proof of the thinking behind what he did publish.
— Steve Oney, The People v. Leo Frank
Leo Frank was recast as the victim of an irrational mob, a well-educated Northern Jew surrounded by ignorant Southern hillbillies. This narrative was repeated ad nauseam until it hardened into dogma: that Frank was not tried for what he did, but for who he was.
Wealthy industrialists, Wall Street financiers, and national Jewish organizations poured hundreds of thousands of dollars (in today’s currency, tens of millions) into the defense and appeals process. The American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith issued bulletins, published pamphlets, and hired the notorious Pinkerton Detective Agency to investigate the case. Newspapers documented the repeated attempts to pressure witnesses, purchase favorable editorials, and even plant evidence:
There was more that disturbed the Constitution reporters. On Monday, April 28th, police investigators entered Newt Lee’s residence [the initial suspect - SE] and found a “fancy” linen shirt apparently covered with blood at the bottom of a clothes hamper. The shirt was indeed his, but police quickly noticed it had not been worn, the blood stain was on the inside, and it appeared to have been wiped in blood as one would use a rag to wipe a table.
Strangely, just moments before the search, Leo Frank’s attorney and fellow B’nai B’rith member Herbert Haas had suggested to detectives that they examine Frank’s soiled clothes bin for potential evidence, ostensibly to clear his client. Investigators saw this miraculously timed suggestion as Haas’s attempt to bait detectives to examine the laundry hampers of both suspects.
— The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man, Pg. 39
The “defense” of Leo Frank in this regard wasn’t a moral aberration — it was a logical outgrowth of a Talmudic ethic. According to Bava Kamma 113a.21–22, it is permissible to deceive a Gentile in order to exonerate a fellow Jew. As this campaign intensified, the defense's media operatives began publishing character attacks on the jury, the judge, and the state’s witnesses, portraying them as rubes and bigots.
But none of it altered the evidence.
It only took the jury a few hours and two ballots to reach their unanimous conclusion — Guilty. Its members — ten white Protestants, one Catholic, and one Jewish businessman — convicted Frank not because he was a Jew, but because he was a liar and a murderer. He contradicted himself repeatedly under oath. He was the last man to see Mary Phagan alive. His alibi had been proven false. He lied about knowing the victim. He lied about when she arrived. He lied about who operated the elevator. He lied about his own whereabouts. Every attempt to cast doubt only reinforced the conclusion: Leo Frank was not the victim of hysteria. He was the cause of it.
The mythos of the noble scapegoat was carefully assembled piece by piece in the pressrooms of New York and Chicago.
But inside that Georgia courtroom, twelve jurors saw through it.
“I feel the same way my family did, justice prevailed."
— Mary Phagan Kean, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan, Pg. 28
The legal appeals were numerous and exhaustive, spanning all the way to the Supreme Court. Every court affirmed the prior verdict. Frank’s defense team knew that the bench had been exhausted, so they turned instead to the governor’s mansion. And there, they found a friendly ear.
Governor John Slaton, in one of the most brazen conflicts of interest in American legal history, was a partner in the law firm that had defended Frank. That firm — Rosser, Brandon, Slaton & Phillips — was deeply entangled in the case’s outcome. As his term neared its end, Slaton began reviewing the trial transcript and intervened at the eleventh hour, commuting Frank’s sentence from death to life in prison. The public reaction was swift and thunderous. Across Georgia, crowds gathered in protest: Slaton’s effigy was hanged in Marietta. He fled the state shortly thereafter, never to hold elected office again.
On the early morning of August 17th, 1915, a group of prominent citizens —lawyers, judges, business owners — took matters into their own hands. These weren’t vagrants or Klansmen: these were upstanding men with everything to lose. After weeks of careful planning, they infiltrated the Milledgeville prison, abducted Frank without firing a shot, and drove him 150 miles to Marietta — Mary Phagan’s hometown. He reportedly said little. He asked that his wedding band be returned to his wife. He declined to confess.
At dawn, they hanged Leo Frank from an oak tree at Frey’s Mill.
— The hanging of Leo Frank, August 1915.
Frank’s death sent shockwaves across the nation. The New York press, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and B’nai B’rith cried out in rage. (Curiously, the same people who had invested a king’s ransom into freeing Frank were strangely pensive when it came to pursuing his executioners.) In Georgia, many felt a different emotion — relief. The Phagan family remained largely silent on the matter until the appeals process began again in 1986, but those close to them knew where they stood. They believed little Mary Phagan had finally received justice.
In the decades that followed, the ADL and its sympathizers would reframe this moment as a shameful case of Southern bigotry. They would rewrite Frank as a saint, a victim of “mob rule” and “anti-Semitic hysteria.” But even Jewish scholars of anti-Semitism, such as Albert S. Lindemann, reject that this case was in any way built on such motivations (emphasis mine):
The case that Dorsey built against Frank was not based in any overt way upon anti-Semitism. Five Jews sat on the grand jury that indicted Frank. It seems safe to conclude that they were persuaded by the concrete evidence that Dorsey presented, not by his pandering to anti-Jewish feeling (the grand jury met before Conley’s testimony against Frank was known, it should be noted.)
— The Jew Accused, Pg. 251
B’nai B’rith has built many institutions — and powerful ones at that — on the back of that lie.
The people who heard the testimony, who saw the evidence, and who knew the character of the man in question, delivered their verdict. So did the men of Marietta, at great personal risk.
Whether Leo Frank deserved his fate is a question one must answer for oneself. But one thing is certain: the mythology surrounding him is not history — it is a gross fiction fashioned to cover up the crimes of a guilty man.
— The Order II, digital art, 2025.
In the decades that followed, a campaign was launched not merely to rehabilitate his reputation, but to invert the entire affair. A man convicted by mountains of testimony, evidence, and a jury became a symbol of oppression; the machinery that worked tirelessly to overturn justice became the conscience of America.
The ADL’s true mission was forged in the narrative war that followed Frank’s conviction: to frame all scrutiny as bigotry, all criticism as incitement, and all opposition as hate. Under the Trump administration, it is a playbook that is increasingly in use. The mythos of Leo Frank has become the ADL’s founding parable, its political crucible, and its perennial weapon.
But the case itself, stripped of the breathless rhetoric, remains plain: a man accused of sexual misconduct by multiple witnesses, caught in repeated contradiction, and convicted by a jury that included members of his own faith. Appeals exhausted, a sentence commuted through political favoritism, and finally executed not by a mob, but by men of good standing. If there was any remarkable racial angle to the case, it is this: in 1913 Georgia, the testimony of a Black man helped convict a white factory owner.
The ADL emerged not to defend Jews in the abstract, and certainly not all races, but to shield elite criminals from scrutiny, turning any public criticism into a hate crime. It plays on the fears of ordinary Jewish people, weaponizing anxieties against them. No longer confined to courtroom advocacy, the ADL now operates as a distinctly political actor — shaping policy, silencing dissent, and leveraging the ghost of Leo Frank.
This founding mythology is what gave rise to a powerful institution that now positions itself as a moral and legal arbiter over American civil discourse.
Concluded in Part III…
“B’nai B’rith will surely be in the forefront of that struggle for justice and equality, as they have led us so often in the past.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., B'nai B'rith: The Story of a Covenant
The Wolves Within is a must-read for every believer who refuses to be deceived.
Hit the Tip Jar and help spread the message!
This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission or affiliate fee for purchases made through these links.
Unlock the mysteries of Biblical cosmology and enrich your faith with some of the top rated Christian reads at BooksOnline.club.
Click the image below and be sure to use promo code SCIPIO for 10% off your order at HeavensHarvest.com: your one stop shop for emergency food, heirloom seeds and survival supplies.
Further Research
The Murder of Little Mary Phagan by Mary Phagan Kean
The Leo Frank Case: Inside Story of Georgia's Greatest Murder Mystery by Atlanta Publishing Company (1913)
Night Fell On Georgia by Charles & Louis Samuels
The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man by The Nation of Islam Research Group
Good write-up, I've seen it before. Really Graceful had a similar video on it. Leo was an Elite it seems, not sure any of people like him are "everyday Jews" any more than the Israeli Govt etc who are occultists pretend to be Jews. Jewish is a religion anyone can be one and the elites love to hide being Jewish. That being said, he was a serial sexual predator it seems. Wonder what else he may have been up to.
Of course there were several GOOD reasons to believe that Leo Frank got PRECISELY what he deserved, to be hanged by the neck until dead.